7 ms·

The thing that I do not understand about the sincerity flag is that it seems to presuppose that my nonflagged comments are insincere? Why would I not flag all

by dfc 12y ago

The thing that I do not understand about the sincerity flag is that it seems to presuppose that my nonflagged comments are insincere? Why would I not flag all of my comments as sincere?

jcr 12y ago
That's a good question, and I've thought about it a bit over the intervening three years. tptacek was shooting from the hip that day, and posting a lot of his ideas (and regular annoyances), one per post, in rapid succession, but without the time needed for a lot of planning or analysis. His idea of "sincere flag" could be improved by combining limits and disincentives to prevent high-karma accounts from just always setting the "sincere flag". There could be the usual limit of a karma threshold for the feature. There could be a limit on how many times or how often the flag could be used. There could also be a disincentive such as making each down-vote or flag cost a lot more (10x/100x/1000x), or making the use of the flag cost something substantial like -X% of all account karma. With the right combination of limits and disincentives, his idea might work, and only be used on special occasions rather than be (ab)used constantly.
- krapp 12y ago
  Why not make karma completely invisible? The most obvious effects of karma, that downvoting blanks out a comment, that you can downvote at a certain threshold, and that the threads are sorted by karma, don't require actually being able to see the number assigned to a poster.
  - mercer 12y ago
    As a thought experiment: what would be the main downside of hiding karma completely?
    - krapp 12y ago
      Maybe, it would remove a convenient proxy by which to judge a posters' credibility before reading their comments? I'm not entirely sold on the utility of karma as a filter for quality, though, but I know some people use it for that.
      - mercer 12y ago
        I thought of that, but 1) if you're invested enough to go do that, you're likely to already notice posters you 'like', 2) even high-karma people can say stupid things and vice-versa, and 3) there could be a 'percentile' system where the top x% get some kind of marking, or even just 'in the top x% of karma).
- dfc 12y ago
  The notion of sincerity and karma is rather apropos for me at the moment. Recently someone mentioned that they noticed a high-karma commenter had deleted some comments that were being downvoted and opined that this was a good way to game karma because it meant that they were refunded the negative karma when the comment was deleted. Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? As luck would have it elsewhere on HN I am hemorrhaging karma at the moment for expressing an unwelcome opinion. I am not ashamed of the content or the manner in which I expressed my opinion so I have no intention of deleting my comments. As far as I am concerned by clicking the reply button I am implicitly stating that my comment is sincere. It seems that HN could introduce an implicit sincere flag if commenters did not get a refund for deleting karma-negative comments.
  - jcr 12y ago
    As far as I know, the karma lost through down-votes on a comment is permanently lost rather than returned/refunded when the comment is deleted. Even if I'm right, your point still stands, since deleting a down-voted comment would put an end to further down-votes, so it's possible that some may delete comments to save face/karma. Similar could be said for editing. Unpopular opinions are always tough situation. Part of the problem stems from "up" and "down" votes meaning different things in different contexts. For example, up-voting a submission is a way to say "thanks" for submitting it. This usage is problematic since the opposite of "thanks" really doesn't exist. The typical negation "No Thanks" is not strong enough, and "flag" is far too strong. For submissions, there is no down-vote. In contrast, votes on comments are often used differently, such as an up-vote being used to show "agreement", and a down-vote being used to show "disagreement". The contrasting usage of votes results in both user-centric context and submission/comment context influencing what each vote means.
  - dang 12y ago
    > Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? No, it's false.

by dfc 12y ago

The thing that I do not understand about the sincerity flag is that it seems to presuppose that my nonflagged comments are insincere? Why would I not flag all of my comments as sincere?

jcr 12y ago

That's a good question, and I've thought about it a bit over the intervening three years. tptacek was shooting from the hip that day, and posting a lot of his ideas (and regular annoyances), one per post, in rapid succession, but without the time needed for a lot of planning or analysis. His idea of "sincere flag" could be improved by combining limits and disincentives to prevent high-karma accounts from just always setting the "sincere flag". There could be the usual limit of a karma threshold for the feature. There could be a limit on how many times or how often the flag could be used. There could also be a disincentive such as making each down-vote or flag cost a lot more (10x/100x/1000x), or making the use of the flag cost something substantial like -X% of all account karma. With the right combination of limits and disincentives, his idea might work, and only be used on special occasions rather than be (ab)used constantly.

krapp 12y ago
Why not make karma completely invisible? The most obvious effects of karma, that downvoting blanks out a comment, that you can downvote at a certain threshold, and that the threads are sorted by karma, don't require actually being able to see the number assigned to a poster.
- mercer 12y ago
  As a thought experiment: what would be the main downside of hiding karma completely?
  - krapp 12y ago
    Maybe, it would remove a convenient proxy by which to judge a posters' credibility before reading their comments? I'm not entirely sold on the utility of karma as a filter for quality, though, but I know some people use it for that.
    - mercer 12y ago
      I thought of that, but 1) if you're invested enough to go do that, you're likely to already notice posters you 'like', 2) even high-karma people can say stupid things and vice-versa, and 3) there could be a 'percentile' system where the top x% get some kind of marking, or even just 'in the top x% of karma).
dfc 12y ago
The notion of sincerity and karma is rather apropos for me at the moment. Recently someone mentioned that they noticed a high-karma commenter had deleted some comments that were being downvoted and opined that this was a good way to game karma because it meant that they were refunded the negative karma when the comment was deleted. Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? As luck would have it elsewhere on HN I am hemorrhaging karma at the moment for expressing an unwelcome opinion. I am not ashamed of the content or the manner in which I expressed my opinion so I have no intention of deleting my comments. As far as I am concerned by clicking the reply button I am implicitly stating that my comment is sincere. It seems that HN could introduce an implicit sincere flag if commenters did not get a refund for deleting karma-negative comments.
- jcr 12y ago
  As far as I know, the karma lost through down-votes on a comment is permanently lost rather than returned/refunded when the comment is deleted. Even if I'm right, your point still stands, since deleting a down-voted comment would put an end to further down-votes, so it's possible that some may delete comments to save face/karma. Similar could be said for editing. Unpopular opinions are always tough situation. Part of the problem stems from "up" and "down" votes meaning different things in different contexts. For example, up-voting a submission is a way to say "thanks" for submitting it. This usage is problematic since the opposite of "thanks" really doesn't exist. The typical negation "No Thanks" is not strong enough, and "flag" is far too strong. For submissions, there is no down-vote. In contrast, votes on comments are often used differently, such as an up-vote being used to show "agreement", and a down-vote being used to show "disagreement". The contrasting usage of votes results in both user-centric context and submission/comment context influencing what each vote means.
- dang 12y ago
  > Is this an accurate description of the karma accounting? No, it's false.